The Invention of Paris (17 page)

As for Pension Laveur, this was, in Léon Daudet's words, ‘a real historic institution which had seen three generations pass, situated on Rue des Poitevins opposite the École de Médecine, in a dilapidated old hôtel . . . You reached the dining rooms and tables by a stone stairway with worn and polished steps, like the border of a Breton well. Aunt Rose, affectionate and venerable, presided over the cash desk, assisted by the brunette Mathilde and Baptiste, who took orders with a smile and brought the dishes grumbling.'
¹⁵²
And Francis Carco, around the same time: ‘I had credit at the Pension Laveur and ate twice a day. Ah, that pension! Despite the smell of cats in the stairway and its lack of pretensions, Baptiste did us well . . .'
¹⁵³
Thirty years earlier you could sometimes meet Courbet there – not yet the ‘famous demolisher' as Lepage called him – but his usual establishment was rather Brasserie Andler on Rue Hautefeuille, where he had his studio. Courbet's arrival at Andler's did not pass unheeded: ‘He advanced, holding his head high – like Saint-Just – and was surrounded! He sat down – and people made a circle around him! He spoke – and people listened to him! When he left, they were still listening.'
¹⁵⁴
On the list of regular customers, mostly now forgotten (‘Simbermann, experimental chemist and member of the meteorological society, Dupré, professor of anatomy, Furne, publisher'), there appears, as if in an obscure corner, ‘Charles Baudelaire, author of
Les Fleurs du mal
, which was still unpublished, and who tried out his Edgar Allan Poe effects on the heads of his companions'.

The literary cafés included some very modest ones, such as Le Soleil d'Or, on the corner of the Place Saint-Michel and the
quai
, where the symbolists held their La Plume evenings, or the Paradox dairy on Rue Saint-André-des-Arts, where you could meet

Auguste Poulet-Malassis, student at the École de Chartes, today a bookseller; a tall chap, very pale, with a certain resemblance to Henri III . . . a charming conversationalist, very intelligent and learned, whom everyone would have loved had he not bent all his efforts to being hated . . . Nadar, a novelist who was not yet a photographer, Asselineau, a young bibliophile who was not yet a critic, Charles Baudelaire, a poet who was not yet a candidate for the Academy, Privat d'Anglemont, a young explorer of the underside of Paris who was not yet in the Montmartre cemetery.
¹⁵⁵

But the most famous of these cafés was the Vachette, on the corner of Rue des Écoles and Boulevard Saint-Michel, frequented by Maurras, Catulle Mendès, Heredia, Huysmans, sometimes Mallarmé, Barrès (‘It is here,' he said, ‘that young people acquire the dyspepsia that gives them a distinguishable physiognomy around the age of forty'), and above all Moréas. ‘I arrived at the Vachette,' Carco recalled, ‘just in time to know Moréas. To the young people who surrounded him, he declared: “Base yourselves firmly on principles.” Then stroking his moustache and adjusting his monocle with an air of authority, he added: “They will certainly end up giving way!”'

At the western edge of the quarter, the symbolists of
Le Mercure de France
and the theatre people had their haunts around the Odéon. In the Café Tabourey, at the corner of Rue Molière (now Rotrou) and Rue de Vaugirard, in the age of
réalisme
, you could often see ‘Champfleury, Pierre Dupont the rustic poet, Charles Baudelaire the materialist poet, Leconte de Lisle the pantheist poet, Hippolyte Babou, Auguste Préault the sculptor, Théodore de Banville . . . I had the honour of seeing there – my little one, my obscure adolescent! – the great and glorious M. de Balzac on the morning of the first performance of his
Les Ressources de Quinola
.'
¹⁵⁶
Much later, in the Café Voltaire on the Place de l'Odéon, where Pierre Louÿs and Henri de Régnier often came, Paul Fort celebrated the marriage of his daughter to Severini: ‘The Prince of Poets, standing on the piano, sang.
Marinetti, whose proud white automobile stood on the grey paving of the Place de l'Odéon, abandoned himself to the joys of Futurism. He broke the glassware. It was splendid.'
¹⁵⁷

As for the Odéon quarter – an isosceles triangle with its apex at the Odéon intersection, its sides formed by Rue Monsieur-le-Prince and Rue de Condé – is it part of the Latin Quarter? Léautaud was categorical, and he knew what he was talking about, as he lived at various times on Rue Monsieur-le-Prince, Rue de l'Odéon and Rue de Condé, working at
Le Mercure de France
on the same street. In his
Journal
, on 6 October 1903, he wrote: ‘Move from Rue de Condé to Rue de l'Odéon, 6 October. Hatred of this whole Latin Quarter. When will I be able to live somewhere else?' For him, it was crossing Rue Tournon that brought you into Saint-Germain-des-Près. In the early twentieth century, and in the years between the wars, this point of view was certainly justified. If the Odéon quarter was not really a student district, the booksellers under the theatre colonnade played a role in literary life. For the
bachelier
Vingtras-Vallès, ‘the Odéon is our club and our asylum. Rummaging on the bookstalls there gives you the air of a man of letters, and at the same time you're sheltered from the rain. We come there when we get tired of the silence and smell of our hovels.' Many years later, Léon Daudet – a student in medicine, which did not work out for him – was also attracted by ‘the famous galleries of the Flammarion bookshop around the Odéon, bristling with books. These are connected for me with meeting rather wild young people, and also with my first success,
Les Morticoles
. I did not dare inquire about it in the two weeks after the volume appeared. The booksellers, who knew me, signalled to me from a distance, and one of them cried out: “Great success!” '
¹⁵⁸

And around the same time, Léon-Paul Fargue: ‘We read under the galleries of the Odéon, standing up, our noses as far forward as possible in pages that were not cut, seeking our food.'
¹⁵⁹
Behind the theatre, on the corner of Rue de Tournon and Rue de Vaugirard, Foyot's restaurant was frequented by intellectuals – senators too – until an anarchist bomb blew them up.
¹⁶⁰
The
Mercure
, and the bookshops of Adrienne Monnier and
Sylvia Beach on Rue de l'Odéon, gave the triangle a literary coloration that succeeded in attaching it to the Latin Quarter, but has since almost entirely disappeared.

To pass from the Luxembourg to Saint-Germain-des-Près you have to cross the little quarter of Saint-Sulpice, and to reach its central square you must choose between three streets which, although all parallel, sloping, short and of the same era, have each to my eyes a different charm. Rue Férou has perhaps the most perfect architecture. Rue Servandoni is the setting for an important episode in
The Three Musketeers
, on which Umberto Eco writes: ‘Alas, our empirical reader will certainly be moved at the mention of the Rue Servandoni, because Roland Barthes lived there, but Aramis couldn't have, because the action takes place in 1625 whereas the Florentine architect Giovanni Niccolo Servandoni was born in 1695, designed the façade of Saint-Sulpice church in 1733, and had the street dedicated to him only in 1806.'
¹⁶¹
For my part, I always choose the third, Rue Garancière, not for the little fountain of the Princess Palatine, nor for the rams of the Hôtel de Sourdéac and the memory of the Plon-Nourrit publishing house, but to greet once again, at the foot of Saint-Sulpice, the lead pelican on top of the large bulbous roof of the chapel of the Assumption, and above all the pendentive supporting the overhang of the axial chapel above the street, a masterpiece of Paris stereotomy, perhaps even finer than the one on the Hôtel Portalis, at the corner of Rue Croix-des-Petits-Champs and Rue de La Vrillière.

There are many things on the Place Saint-Sulpice. For example: a
mairie
, a tax office, a police station, three cafés – one selling tobacco –, a cinema, a church on which Le Vau, Gittard, Oppenordt, Servandoni and Chalgrin worked, and which is dedicated to an almoner of Clotaire II who was bishop of Bourges from 624 to 644, with his feast day on 17 January, a publisher, an undertaker, a travel agent, a bus stop, a tailor's, a hotel, a fountain decorated with the statues of four great Christian orators (Bossuet, Fénelon, Fléchier and Massillon), a newspaper kiosk, a shop selling pious objects, a car park, a beauty parlour and many more.
¹⁶²

By contamination from the style of plaster saints known as
saint-sulpicien
, this square and its church have often been badly thought of (‘Herrera lived on Rue Cassette, near Saint-Sulpice, the church to which he was attached. This building, hard and stern in style, suited this Spaniard, whose discipline was that of the Dominicans.'
¹⁶³
). But there are now many who admire the double portico of Servandoni's façade, and regret that his death prevented him from finishing the square and realizing the grand arch he had designed along the axis of the church, under which Rue Neuve-Saint-Sulpice would have opened.
¹⁶⁴

Of the quarters defined by the
ordonnance
of 1702, Saint-Germain-des-Près was the twentieth and last, a sufficient sign that it was not similar in kind to the others. The old abbey, which had remained outside Charles V's walls but was fortified at the same epoch, kept its defences until the 1670s and was never part of Paris. When all the fortifications were pulled down, the abbey also demolished its crenellated precinct and filled up the ditches over which the major streets of the present-day quarter were built.

Around the monastery – of which the bell tower of Saint-Germain-des-Près indicates the centre – a whole community of merchants and artisans developed, living peacefully there just as in other Parisian enclosures. It was known indifferently as the
bourg
or
faubourg
Saint-Germain. In the eighteenth century it was a quadrilateral, with three of its sides corresponding to modern streets: Rue Saint-Benoît, Rue Jacob, Rue de l'Échaudé (the name does not refer to a ‘scalded' person, but to a triangular cake – and by extension to a block of houses of this shape bounded by this street, along with Rue de la Seine and Rue Jacob). The fourth side was formed by a sequence of three streets, more or less along the line of Boulevard Saint-Germain: from west to east, these were Rue Taranne – where Diderot lived for a long time, commemorated by a statue there – Rue Sainte-Marguerite and Rue des Boucheries.
¹⁶⁵
Other streets were laid down within the abbey grounds, of which Rue Abbatiale (now Passage de la
Petite-Boucherie), Rue Cardinale and Rue de Furstemberg remain (Place de Furstemberg was the stable yard of the abbey). Despite the cutting of Rue de l'Abbaye and Rue Bonaparte in the early nineteenth century, as proposed by the Commission des Artistes, and the incomparably more brutal cutting of Boulevard Saint-Germain and Rue de Rennes, the centre of Saint-Germain-des-Près is still today the Abbaye quarter.

Between the
bourg
of Saint-Germain and the city, the centre of activity was focused on two crossroads that have preserved despite everything their life and energy. The first was the confluence of Rue de Buci with Rue du Four and Rue des Boucheries – now the Mabillon intersection. From here, Rue de Montfaucon led to the Saint-Germain fairground, one of the great attractions of Paris since the twelfth century. This was held each year on Palm Sunday, a week before Easter, on the site of the present market, surrounded by four streets with the names Clément, Mabillon, Lobineau and Félibien, all eminences of the Benedictine order.
¹⁶⁶
It was initially a luxury market selling rare objects, ‘sweet nothings' from Flanders and Germany, Venetian mirrors, Indian cloth, and wonders from other far-off countries brought in by the Portuguese merchants that Scarron conjures up: ‘Take me to the Portuguese/We shall find at low price/Goods from China./We shall find ambergris/And varnished woods/From that divine country/Or rather from that paradise.' But the fair was also a place of entertainment for a very mixed population, prefiguring the Wooden Galleries of the Palais-Royal or the slopes of La Courtille. The aristocracy visited there after supper. People played skittles,
tourniquet
(a kind of roulette), dice or cards. Women of the highest rank, with black velvet masks, watched the games or played themselves, their eyes reflecting the light of the torches. Mixed in with this elegant crowd were quarrelsome ‘schoolboys', lackeys, bourgeois, and thieves who picked pockets and cut purses. ‘There, men six feet tall, with high boots and hair styled like sultans, passed for giants. A shaved and depilated female bear, clothed in jacket and trousers, was taken for a unique and extraordinary animal. A wooden colossus spoke, having hidden within it a four-year-old boy.'
¹⁶⁷

The other lively crossroads was at the Porte de Buci, where Rue Saint-André-des-Arts crossed the Paris fortifications (level with Rue Mazet). This gate controlled an old road which, until the building of the Pont-Neuf, was the obligatory itinerary for the inhabitants of Saint-Germain, if they wanted to
cross to the Cité by the Petit-Pont: the artery of Rue du Four–Rue de Buci–Rue Saint-André-des-Arts. Rue Dauphine, a major route in the first operation of concerted town planning in Paris – along with the Place Dauphine and the Pont-Neuf – reached this crossroads obliquely. Nine metres across, this was the widest street in Paris. Henri IV wanted it to have a regular architecture. On 2 May 1607 he wrote to Sully: ‘My friend, following what I have told you that work is beginning on the buildings that are in the new road going from the end of the Pont-Neuf to the Porte de Bussy, I wanted to send you this word to tell you that I would be very happy if you would explain to those who start building in this road that they should make the front of their houses entirely in the same order, for it would be a fine ornament to see from the end of the bridge this road with one and the same façade.'
¹⁶⁸